Modest moves during a 'difficult' Bruins deadline

The first NHL trade deadline Sweeney is referring to is the 2015-16 season when he landed Lee Stempniak and John-Michael Liles at the late February trade deadline, and that team narrowly missed the Stanley Cup playoff cut due to a tiebreaker with the Detroit Red Wings. This was a far different situation because several factors faced the Bruins in this challenging transitional season to conspire to keep Boston from ever becoming any kind of a bigger deadline player. 

The total lack of salary cap space, a dearth of draft pick collateral to be used in potential trades after going “all in” last season and an unwillingness to trade their top prospects combined to construct a very limited range of moves possible to improve the Black and Gold.

It all translated into the Bruins shipping B-prospect Luke Toporowski and a conditional sixth-round pick to Minnesota for big, physical fourth liner and Stanley Cup good luck charm Pat Maroon and sending former first-rounder Jakub Zboril and a third-round pick to the Columbus Blue Jackets for rugged 25-year-old defenseman Andrew Peeke. Maroon is exactly the kind of hulking, large presence that the Bruins hoped to have with Milan Lucic before that clearly didn't work out due to off-ice issues.

These were low-cost moves meant to add grittiness and physicality to a talented group that could use a little more of each headed into the Stanley Cup playoffs, but also was a far cry from Bruins fans dreaming about somebody like Noah Hanifin or Canucks frontline center Elias Lindholm ending up on Boston’s doorstep at the deadline.

“We know when [Maroon] plays his best hockey, and the fact is that he's been part of championship teams, and the pedigree that he has, and what he brings to the table is important to us on and off the ice, and we're excited to bring Pat on board,” said Sweeney, while also indicating it will be at least a few weeks before he’ll be able to play following early February back surgery. “Andrew [Peeke] addresses another need for us, in depth in the right side, size, penalty killing. In years past, we've gone through most of the defenseman at certain times and areas of the game that he can help booster our group and bring balance to our group…I think is important.

“I think it’ll be an adjustment coming into a new structure and the systems that we play. But we're excited about going to work with him as a bigger body in the right side that I think is hard to find. It's not a rental, you know, we have that player moving forward. He's young, and we'll have to make sure we continue to sharpen up his game. He's excited.”

It essentially looks like the 6-foot-3, 210-pound Peeke will replace Derek Forbort, who is being placed on long-term injured reserve with a pair of season-ending injuries. Peeke has been in and out of the lineup as a healthy scratch in Columbus this season but played nearly every game for the Blue Jackets in the previous two seasons while racking up an unsightly minus-60 during his NHL career.

Clearly there are severe limitations to what Peeke will bring offensively and he’s experienced defensive issues on some bad Blue Jackets teams, but Bruins talent evaluators see something in him the same way they spotted something with players like Parker Wotherspoon, Justin Brazeau, Morgan Geekie and Jesper Boqvist among others.

What the Bruins didn’t do was upgrade their center situation after being linked to Elias Lindholm while Vancouver reportedly discussed a potential three-team deal involving Jake Guentzel. That possibility blew up when Guentzel was dealt to the Carolina Hurricanes instead, but also might never have been a possibility anyway as goaltender Linus Ullmark reportedly wouldn’t waive his no-trade clause to clear cap space for the B’s.

“If we were going to do that and potentially weaken our hockey club in that area, it had to offset somewhere else, and we didn't find the right situation that might have done that. I wasn't overly aggressive about it,” said Sweeney. “Rumors are rumors in terms of what happens in private conversations. You guys know me well enough that it's not coming from here in terms of what we're trying to explore, and what other teams are asking about. 

“I made no bones that if I had to rob from a real strength as hockey club that was something we may have to do, if that made our team ultimately better. We didn't move in that direction. But that's not an indictment on the two great goaltenders we have. It's actually been a real strength of our hockey club from day one, and it'll continue throughout [the rest of the season].”

Unfortunately, the issues in the faceoff circle, the struggles to close out leads in the third period and an offensive that isn’t quite as explosive as least season all point toward potential playoff weaknesses to be exploited. But the Bruins didn’t have the wherewithal to acquire some kind of faceoff specialist center along with the Maroon and Peeke trades, and Sweeney admitted as much when it was all over.

“You know from day one of the season that we’d be a work in progress and [we would] see what we could accomplish as a group and grow as a group. We're a real competitive team. We want to continue to continue getting to the point where we wanted to add and try and find some areas that we felt were areas that we could improve upon,” said Sweeney. “I know I probably didn't check all those [boxes] off you know, in a perfect world I would have liked to. But, again, you're not always going to you know, accomplish every one of your goals that you set out, but it doesn't stop you from trying.”

At the end of the day, the Bruins are a little deeper, a little bigger and heavier and have a little more Stanley Cup-winning experience than they did prior to the trade deadline. It’s fair to mark the NHL trade deadline as a minor win with a lower case ‘w’ for a Bruins team amidst a transitional season that didn’t have the assets to go “all in” again like they’ve done routinely in the recent past. 

It could have been a little better, it surely could have been much worse and there is a very finite limit as to how much impact either of these moves will have on the ultimate fate of this season’s hockey team.